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Jl\t.. , ' ' ' ' ' ' ' 'Jir'Ar'Jir " ible that the United States should be joining arms in Nicaragua with Somozists-the allies of the former dictator, Anastasio Somoza-as do many former opponents of the Somoza government who have broken with the Sandinist regime. They argue that the Reagan Administration has taken steps that have served to strengthen the grip and the militancy of the Sandinist government (named after a Genera] Sandino, a Nicaraguan revo- lutionary who fought American Ma- rines in Nicaragua in the late nine- teen-twenties and early thirties). Haig is busy letting it be known that he warned against covert action at the outset. However, Weinberger opposed the kind of move that Haig wanted to make and still believes would have worked: taking some military action against Cuba. Middle-level officials in the State Department who actually have some expertise in Latin-Amer- ican affairs are depressed. And at hig her levels there has been internal dissension over policy. When Thomas Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, who had taken a hard line, suggested in February that there might be nego- tiations with the rebels in EI Salvador while aid to the government con- tinued, he was subjected to a pre- emptive strike in the newspapers by Clark and Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Ambassador to the United Nations. Mrs. Kirkpatrick went off to Central America, and her report to the Presi- dent upon her return led the Adminis- tration to ask for more military aid for El Salvador. In general, the N .S.C. takes a harder line than State on how to deal with Central America. Clark is said to feel quite comfortable about his own judgments on the subject. People here who dissent from the Administra- tion policy-including some former career officials who worked on the area under previous Administrations, as well as some Democrats-say that they share some of the Administra- tion's fears about the area, but not its diagnosis or its proposed solution. De- velopments that there had long been reason to fear have been coming about -a reaction against oligarchical and repressive regimes, which others who do not wish us well were sure to take advantage of. But these dissenters have been arguing that, as Senator Christo- pher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, puts it, the Administration sees the problem too much through the prism of the Soviet Union and its clients, and too little in terms of the indigenous factors that the Russians and the Cubans are exploiting. They have been arguing for more emphasis on diplomatic solutions and negotiations and less on military solutions, and more attention to what the non-Com- munist governments in the area are saying-emphases to which the Presi- dent paid homage in his televised address before a Joint session of Congress. In fact, one senses that, de- spite the forcefulness with which the various arguments are put, people here are in quite a quandary about Central America, and that there is very little certainty about what will "work." The rationale behind the Presi- dent's address was not simply to help him present his case to the public and get his way with an increasingly resis- tant Congress but also to set Congress up in case of reverses in the region. At the time, things were seen to be going badly for the government of El Sal- vador. When I asked one senior White House aide, shortly before the speech, what the pluses and minuses of the exercise were, he replied that the President did run a real risk of being rebuffed on some of his requests, and there was the danger that if the speech did not strike the right tone it might add to Reagan's "warmonger"-his term-problem. (He added that he doubted whether the latter would oc- cur, because the President wouldn't "be talking about missiles and mega- tonnage and throw-weight.") He said that the President would not be talk- ing about sending troops. He contin- ued, "the record needs to be made clear about what we think needs to be done, so that when the time comes to say who lost El Salvador, or why another Central American govern- ment went Communist, the American people will know whom to blame " He added, "It would be a shame if we lost another country to Communism on our watch." (Reagan is fond of saying that the Soviet Union has not "ex- panded into an extra square inch since we've been here," and the "not on our